Of recent years artificial _truffières_ have been largely planted in the favoured districts of southern France. To M. Rousseau, a proprietor of Vaucluse, has been erroneously ascribed the discovery of this means of production. Already during the middle of the eighteenth century M. de Montclar, procureur-général at Aix, discovered truffles as the result of sowing acorns on his lands; but, the truffles disappearing subsequently, no further attention was paid to the matter, and the relation between cause and effect passed unnoticed or was forgotten. Since then Poitou, Périgord, and Provence have each claimed to be the discoverer of artificial truffle culture. It is within a comparatively short period only that the merit of originating the system, now a source of great revenue, was adjudged, after painstaking investigation, to Joseph Talon, a small landholder of Vaucluse, who about eighty years ago sowed some acorns in an unremunerative piece of ground. Ten years afterwards, while passing through the plantation with the pig he employed in hunting, he was not a little surprised to find truffles beneath the oaks; when, recollecting that he had obtained the acorns from a truffle-oak, he repeated the sowing on another plot, which in course of time proved equally successful. The theory was established beyond a doubt, and the result finally became generally known, despite his efforts to keep it secret. Many unsuccessful attempts at artificial truffle-raising have been made. In 1830 Alexander Bernholz, a German, published a long treatise on the subject, his theory being that by planting truffles in soil composed of certain ingredients, and in localities and expositions corresponding to their natural habitat, they could be successfully grown. Count Noé, in the south of France, is said to have succeeded in raising truffles in his woods by irrigating the ground, after a certain degree of preparation, with water in which the skins of truffles had been rubbed. But this statement, as well as other reputed successful attempts at reproduction, would not seem to have been borne out in France, where the planting of young truffle-oaks, the acorns of truffle-oaks, or certain other truffle-producing trees alone has accomplished the desired result. In artificial plantations the truffles form in from six to ten years, usually disappearing when the trees are twenty-five or thirty years old. Then, after a variable period of non-production, the tuber often forms again. As the truffle-tree develops, the vegetable growth which surrounds it begins to decline, a certain index that truffles are commencing to form--the ground round a truffle-producing tree being always sterile. When the truffles cease the herbage again appears.